Roku Users Affected by Peculiar FBI Warnings on Screen

An outage that affected several thousand Roku users still puzzles the company’s support department. On Tuesday, Roku subscribers were unable to stream content on YouTube, Netflix, and other channels. The company declared that this outage would be solved with the utmost dispatch.

Roku Streaming Players Displaying FBI Warnings

On Tuesday, several hundred users called the company’s support department to complain about their streaming devices.

According to a company spokesperson, Roku subscribers could not load popular streaming channels. Instead, they were bombarded by FBI copyright infringement messages, which lingered on their screens.

Peculiar enough, apart from not being able to access Netflix or YouTube, users were also barred from viewing other Roku channels such as FandangoNow or FoxSportGo.

At the moment, the support team is working on fixing the issue. Meanwhile, users were asked to update their Roku TV software or to perform a hard reset. Based on the information collected so far, it would appear that the FBI message was only a glitch. An FBI spokesperson could not be reached.

Interestingly enough, the company has had legal trouble with its content and media players.

Roku is a popular streaming service since it’s very easy to use and to install. Apart from the channels that can be streamed in a totally legal manner, the service also features third-party channels that stream unauthorized content.

At the beginning of 2018, Roku was dragged to court and accused of actively supporting piracy. Although the lawsuit is far from over, a Mexican court still ordered the company to remove all streaming devices from stores.

Conclusion

In the wake of this scandal, various publications from Hollywood identified a new piracy trend. Dubbed Piracy version 3.0, this trend broadly refers to legit channels streaming illegal content.

Since the tendency was identified, Roku and many others invested quite a lot to combat this form of piracy.